Belkin’s black eye: company caught paying for user reviews

Reading user reviews on sites like Amazon can be a good way to get an idea of …

The Internet may have given everyone a voice, but that also means that anyone can have a voice... and it can be hard to figure out who is worth listening to when looking at product reviews. Belkin hasn't made that process any easier, as the company has been caught buying positive reviews for its routers. The price for a positive review? Under a dollar, and you better be calling "legit" reviews unhelpful before you ask for your paycheck.

The fake reviews came from Michael Bayard, a business development representative with Belkin. He posted an ad on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a site that allows businesses to hire workers to do online tasks that can't be automated. You wrote a positive review, talked down the real reviews, and you made 65 cents. Of course, the ad for this work was available for anyone to see, so the idea didn't stay secret for long.

Mark Reynoso, the president of Belkin, commented about the incident on the company's website, and the ensuing bad press. "Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction," he wrote. "We regard our responsibility to our user community as sacred, and we are extremely sorry that this happened."

The company also promised to remove the offending reviews, and the postings from Mechanical Turk. Reynoso also stressed that the company's retail partners had no hand in these reviews.

This isn't the first time user reviews have been abused to get an agenda across. When EA's Spore launched with invasive DRM, gamers flooded Amazon with one-star reviews, complaining about the practice. The reviews briefly disappeared, with Amazon calling the issue a "glitch," but they remained up, and the message was sent loud and clear: the people were fighting back.

While user reviews can be a helpful way to find out about products, in most cases there is almost no oversight or moderation going on. You can review a product if you own it, if you don't own it, if you have a family member who works for the company, or if you have a grudge against the corporation that owns it. As with everything online, the best course of action is to look at every review, no matter the source, critically. This story may not be a unique one, save for the fact that the company is question was caught with such damning evidence.